News-Record.com

The gold-truck will once again role through Mayberry as President Bush is due to come to town on Sept. 30.

The curious thing for me in reporting this story was that Democrats were a lot happier about the impending visit of a sitting Republican president than were Republicans. Here's a few relevant graphs from the story (published Saturday):

Bush canceled a fundraising trip this week in Alabama and Florida. If this one comes to pass, it will be just more than a month before the election, and some political observers say state-level candidates might have reason to be uncomfortable with the visit.

According to opinion polls, the president’s generic job approval rating is between 30 percent and 40 percent, dipping to 25 percent in some states such as California.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole “is the one who obviously is affected the most,” said Andrew Taylor, a political science professor at N.C. State. “She hasn’t explicitly tried to distance herself from the president, but there’s no real embrace of the president. It doesn’t help her that people will be reminded that she and the president share party affiliation.”

Dole is locked in a tighter-than-expected re-election campaign against state Sen. Kay Hagan , a Greensboro Democrat who has attracted national attention for her aggressive campaign and ability to keep pace with the widely known Dole.

When asked about the scheduled presidential visit, Hagan spokeswoman Colleen Flanagan cited Dole’s record of voting in concert with the president 92 percent of the time, a statistic that campaign has used for months in television ads and on the stump.

“President Bush may go, but his legacy will live on if we re-elect Elizabeth Dole to the U.S. Senate,” Flanagan said.

This earlier blog post from D-2008 had a copy of the invitation and a few other tidbits.